Jeanne Guyon died on this day, the 9th of June in 1717. Her life was complex, involved a very unhappy marriage, numerous deaths, and a lifetime of illness. She was also a mystic and author of a controversial text, A Very Short and Easy Method of Prayer. Madame Guyon’s treatise was an elaboration of what she learned from the Spanish priest and spiritual director Miguel de Molinos. Fr Molinos taught a form of presence that entails the annihilation... Read more
Back in April, Jan and I made our first visit to my seminary, the Pacific School of Religion since I graduated with my Master of Divinity degree in 1991. PSR nestles on Holy Hill above the UC Berkeley campus as a part of the Graduate Theological Union, itself composed of Catholic, Protestant, and Buddhist seminaries, as well as Jewish and Muslim centers. It is an amazing collaborative.... Read more
In 1960, while being interviewed on the television show “Meet the Press,” Dr Martin Luther King, Jr, observed, “I think it is one of the tragedies of our nation, one of the shameful tragedies, that 11 o’clock on Sunday morning is one of the most segregated hours, if not the most segregated hours in Christian America.” Sixty years and change later, it’s still true. And, actually, the tragedy extends beyond Christian communities. Perhaps... Read more
The novelist Lidia Yuknavitch tells how once in her youth, “Joan of Arc visited me in a dream—in the dream, I was standing in our front yard and our house was on fire. She stepped out of the burning house and said ‘No one is coming to save you.’” Joan comes to us in dreams. She can do that. And those words. Well, if anyone knows those words, it would be Joan.... Read more
Today is the fiftieth day after Easter Sunday. In the Western church it marks the marvelous fable of the holy spirit coming to rest upon a throng of Jesus’ followers who had gathered in Jerusalem for the festival of weeks. While I might argue the point, Pentecost is usually called the birthday of the Christian church. I have a favorite trope that I cite from time to time. It goes “the spirit lists (or rests) where it will.”... Read more
Today marks the 220th anniversary of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s birth. Me, I consider this a signal event in the spiritual development of North America. And, who knows, perhaps the world. He was a central founder of the Unitarian Transcendentalist movement. For most of America, Transcendentalism was a literary movement. However, in fact it was a theological and spiritual revolution within American Unitarianism and only incidentally a literary phenomenon. I often think of how Zen’s rise... Read more
After I shared my ChatGPT “homily on love” in the style of “James Ishmael Ford” one of my kinder friends assured me the voice was no where near like mine. Way too saccharine. Which I appreciated until I realized in a sentence by someone who is a precise writer, who exactly was saccharine was not actually clear. Then another friend agreed that it wasn’t my voice. “Not a single single word sentence.” Which is sort of my trademark.... Read more
I asked ChatGPT to “write a homily on love in the style of James Ishmael Ford. It did. At least sort of. Parts of it have robot James suggesting some sort of essence to life that we call love. On the one hand I’m pretty relentless in rejecting any form of essentialism. On another I probably have written words like that. And I’m assuming ChatGPT is drawing on things I’ve written. Then it shifts and I’m a... Read more
Me, I love saints. I love the whole category of saints, holy people of their various religions. Holy people who are not quite considered gods, but who partake of something special. Sometimes they’re martyrs for their faiths. Often they’re wonder workers, in large or small ways. They might have the marks of the divine like stigmata among Christians. They may blend into prophecy, or be charismatic teachers. A very important function of saints is as... Read more
I noticed how today, the 20th of May, is a feast for Lucifer in some parts of the Catholic liturgical calendar. Okay, Lucifer of Cagliari, a fourth century bishop of Cagliari in Sardina. Not much remembered these days outside of Sardina, he left a trail of controversy. His fame at the time was as a ferocious opponent of Arianism. His views were so extreme that even Athanasius who is said to have physically assaulted the priest Arius,... Read more
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